I went to see the Gilbert & George exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art over winter break. Let me tell you, their art is crazy. These two London artists address war, sex, politics, religion, and bodily functions. Their earlier work includes mostly black and white sketches, but they are better known for their shocking large-scale pieces: digital collages of photographs, graphics, and color.

I didn’t understand a lot of their work, but I did enjoy it. There was everything from feces to naked bodies to psychedelic crowds of people to screaming, angry faces. Sometimes Gilbert & George have a specific political message, but sometimes it seems like they are just trying to send a message, any at all.

Gilbert & George paste real personals into their piece, alongside crude graffiti, eerie eye-shots, and photographs of themselves. There’s Gilbert pictured in front of the personals. Three giant panels took up an entire wall of the museum.

In Nao’s Indigurrito, she invites white men to come up onstage and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man’s guilt by eating a burrito. Then she fastens the burrito onto her crotch.

What if we had a Haverford version of Indigurrito? The food item would have to be with the DC’s classic “whipped potatoes.” The crime in question would have to be years of constraining, Quakerly, PC liberalism.

Nao could invite Haverfordians onstage to release themselves from their smothering progressive ways by eating mashed potatoes. Then she could place the mashed potatoes inside her mouth and force the unsuspecting audience members to bring their lips up close to hers. They would have to free themselves through the very instrument that caused their stifled silence. They would have to physically ingest their liberation, in a very new and uncomfortable way. Hopefully, they might finally be able to let out the words they have been pressing deep down in their minds and in the pits of their stomachs.

I was researching Nao and the Anonymous Was a Women grant she received, when I accidentally stumbled upon this little jewel: the Guerilla Girls. These feminists dress up in gorilla gear and protest sexism, racism, and corruption in art. Their motto is, “Fighting discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur.” They ask, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” They have a book Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes. When the Broad Contemporary Art Museum had an exhibition with 97% white and 87% male artists, they wrote a letter of protest, signed, “All our love, Guerilla Girls” (detailed in the New Yorker article I found). They visit colleges with lectures, performances, and workshops. Think we can get ‘em at Haverford?

I went to MOMA with Jane and Cubby to see Pipilotti Rist’s psychedelic, wall-covering video Pour Your Body Out. But I found myself drawn through translucent pink doors to the Here Is Every. exhibit, where I saw Mirror of Light, by Waltercio Caldas.

This was no case of “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” In Caldas’s 6×6’ mirror, reality (captured in a simple black frame) was the only thing to greet us. The one embellishment is a small red light bulb toward the bottom right, more a part of the perceived reflection than of reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, I’m Robin, and I’ll be working with Nao Bustamante along with Jane.

John Muse, the professor who conceived this wonderful “among friends” project, has been treating us lucky “friends” to a chain of emails with links to art blogs, sites, and exhibits. One in particular caught my eye, a piece at the Whitney by Corin Hewitt.

I’m Jane, and I’ll be working for Nao Bustamante along with Robin Riskin for the among friends symposium. For now though I’d like to discuss another woman: Susan Sontag. Sontag was an American critic and most of her stuff got published in and around the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Socially, she was a quite the scenester and a wunderkind of 16 when she started at UC Berkeley. Her obsession was culture – absorbing it, interpreting it, writing about it, living in it. She wrote about photography, interpretation, AIDS, pain, camp, and today we get a chance to see her look at herself. I just got her recently published journals and I feel like they should have a place in the among friends blog. Click the link and we can read these together.